David Irving's failure to win his
libel suit against American academic Deborah E.
Lipstadt last week has been widely depicted as his
comeuppance. In her 1993 book,
"Denying the
Holocaust," Lipstadt described Irving
as "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust
denial." So important was the case regarded that to aid
Lipstadt's defense team, the Israeli government released
Adolf Eichmann's memoir, which it had kept under lock
and key. Having failed to prove that Lipstadt's description
of him was libelous, Irving, so the argument goes, has
destroyed whatever shreds remained of his reputation as a
serious scholar. Revisionism about World War II has been
dealt a decisive blow.

This is a half-truth. Irving's decision to sue
Lipstadt turned out to be a huge blunder, but he
still has his own web of financial backers in
Europe and the United States. Whenever he visits
the U.S., he travels in
sumptuous style, staying in million-dollar homes
and riding in luxury cars. Poverty will
probably not be a big concern of Irving's. Nor have
Irving's academic defenders abandoned him. In a
disgraceful April 12 essay in the London Daily
Telegraph, the respected military historian John
Keegan marveled that Irving's "performance was
very impressive. He is a large, strong, handsome
man, excellently dressed. . . . While Lipstadt
seems as dull as only the self-righteously
politically correct can be," Keegan concluded,
Irving "still has much that is interesting to tell
us."

So important was the case regarded that to aid
Lipstadt's defense team, the Israeli government
released Adolf Eichmann's memoir, which it had kept
under lock and key.

Indeed, he does. The excellently dressed Irving wasn't
able to take in Judge Charles Gray, who presided at
the trial, but he did show how Holocaust revisionists don't
attempt as much to deny the event outright as to dismiss its
importance and significance. It revealed that they do this
because World War II remains key to their nationalist
political agendas.

In Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Sweden and Italy,
nationalist movements see World War II as the main barrier
to rehabilitating nationalism. From Europe to Japan,
revisionism about genocide and World War II is on the rise.
Far from being viewed complacently, Irving's defeat should
not be allowed to obscure the rise of new-right movements
exploiting resentment about the past and fear of immigration
today to rehabilitate nationalism.

Few historians have done more to carry this out than
Irving. He has consistently attempted to relativize German
history; he would liken Winston Churchill to Adolf
Hitler; call the bombing
of Dresden a war crime; depict World War II from
Joseph Goebbels' perspective; and blame the Holocaust
itself, not on Hitler, but on Goebbels. Everything was done
to portray Nazism in the most sympathetic light possible,
while, at the same time, declaring, in his Goebbels
biography, "I have lived in the evil shadow of Dr. Joseph
Goebbels for over seven years."

In doing this, Irving was
hearkening back to the worst conservative English
traditions of appeasement. Today's nationalist Tories
bemoan the fact that the British empire was destroyed in
World War II and regard Churchill as something of a
traitor for failing to cut a deal with Hitler. Their
animus toward World War II carries over to its result:
the creation of the European Union and immigration, which
they regard as the final threats to British
sovereignty.

Irving's line isn't one that just far-right English
nationalists take. Given his ability to palliate the Nazi
record, it was no accident that Irving was one of the main
speakers for the German People's Union and a popular figure
in Joerg Haider's Austrian Freedom Party. Until he
was banned
from Germany in 1993, Irving addressed rallies of the
German People's Union, whose members are admirers of Hitler.
In 1990, Irving was the main speaker at a revisionist
conference in Munich; he attended a dinner on Hitler's
birthday held by the well-known neo-Nazi Ewald
Althans: "It ended," Irving later recalled, "with a
toast spoken by [Althans] to a certain statesman
whose 101st birthday falls today. All rose, toasted; I had
no glass, as I don't drink." Irving also published a paean
to a 75-year-old Wehrmacht veteran who immolated himself in
Munich, in April 1995, to protest "judicial Zionist terror";
Irving called him a "hero." Irving will become a martyr for
the European right now that he has lost his case. But, as
Irving surveys the European landscape, he has much to
comfort him.

In Switzerland, the leader of the People's Party,
Christoph Blocher, got into hot water after defending
a book denying the Holocaust. Infuriated by the demand that
their banks disclose funds secreted from Jewish victims of
the Holocaust and fearful of immigration, the Swiss turned
to Blocher's party in the last election. The amount of
anti-Semitism in the
country should not be underestimated.

Then there is Austria, where Haider has profited from
fears of immigrants and a disdain for the Nazi past. Haider,
as is well known, has made numerous comments sympathetic to
Nazism, including praising the employment policies of the
Third Reich. He personifies the casual new approach to the
Holocaust: When asked if he believed 6 million Jews had
died, he responded, "If you like." His attitude is meant to
convey the impression that the Holocaust was no big
deal.

In
Belgium and France, right-wing movements have also become a
staple of the political scene. Jean-Marie Le Pen's
Front National was reinforced by Philippe de
Villiers' Movement for France. Like Haider, de Villiers
is a cool right-winger who shuns the overtly racist language
of Le Pen.

As if Europe weren't bad enough, revisionism about World
War II is rampant in Japan. That country has yet to face up
to its role in massacring Chinese in Nanjing in 1937.
Indeed, the nationalist governor of Tokyo Shintaro Ishihara,
created an uproar by using a World War II term for
foreigners. Ishihara said that soldiers in a local garrison
should be prepared for "people from third countries" to riot
should an earthquake take place. Not surprisingly, Ishihara
has also dismissed the notion that a massacre took place in
Nanjing, and would like to boot the U.S. military out of
Japan.

In all these countries, the obstacle that nationalists
face is memory of the atrocities of World War II. The lesson
drawn after the war in Europe and Japan was that nationalism
leads to authoritarian regimes that engage in genocide. The
end of the Cold War has triggered a new war of memories --
in which nationalists are seeking to return to older
traditions that they believe were temporarily derailed by
World War II and the Cold War. Politically correct is what
they like to call anyone who defies them, which is why the
historian [Sir John] Keegan's calling Lipstadt that
was so dangerous. Irving may be
finished, but revisionist nationalism is
not.